Saturday, July 6, 2013

Kazan Day Three...Die Pet (High Five!)

Our guide, Sasha, has been teaching us some Russian. I wanted to know important words like "High Five" and "Fist Bump!" and "Strong Work". He is amused with my humor. The village is filling up fast. There are thousands of athletes representing hundreds of countries here now and there is quite a buzz of activity going on. I can see why sports are a great ambassador for different countries around the world. Today North Korea arrived and had their flag ceremony.

The Marianas Flag is the first flag you see when you walk into the Beach Volleyball Venue. There are 7 courts, 6 outer courts and 1 main court.

The main court will seat 1,500 people. That would be a huge crowd to play in front of for our boys.

The city of Kazan has really done a fabulous job on dressing the city up. They also have over 20,000 volunteers, that have all been given uniforms (bright red) and are well trained and very helpful.

One of the boys said this looked like me when I play volleyball...I'll take that as a compliment.

We went to the shopping mall across the street from our Village and found a nice gun store which had all kinds of knives and compound bows. It was an interesting shop for Russia.

John found a rodeo seat that once you sat on it it tried to buck you off. Luckily, he held on.

The Athlete Village has hundreds of bikes that you just grab and ride. We are on day three of the event, and many of the bikes are broken. They were poor quality and then have big people trying to ride them. Luckily, we found three of them that worked and had a nice ride around the village.

This photo was taken at 9pm. It does not get dark here until about 10:30pm. I love it!

Most of the countries have arrived and have their flags up. They do a big production with singing, dancing and gift exchanges for each country. We do ours tomorrow, followed by the opening ceremonies of the games. So, there will be lots of photos coming.